“Belburga?” Anastasia suddenly thrust her head forward. “But how can that be? Surely you are wrong, for there can hardly be two—no, no, not with daughters and pointed teeth. But how confusing! First she is in Little Darlingham selling to my old master the curse which has so cruelly undone Princess Bronwyn, and now you say she is in Frostingdung?”
Bronwyn agreed with the swan. “It’s hard to see how she could have moved without consulting you, when you were only under that glacier for a moment.”
The swan flipped her head, as if shaking off water, and preened in a quick and finicky fashion.
The mermaid gazed at Bronwyn with new interest. “This curse. It’s been mentioned before. What is it?”
“Boils,” Bronwyn said, recalling the Lord Chamberlain’s affliction, the evolution and resolution of which she used to watch with a sort of nauseated fascination. “I break out in horrible boils whenever anyone lays violent hands on me. Hurts like the dickens, and of course they’re contagious as all get out. Big puffy red ones with white cores that go pop and…”
“Ye—ess,” Lorelei said, her cheeks almost as green as her eyes and hair. “I can see where that might be a disadvantage.”
“It’s not just the pain, oh no,” Bronwyn said, warming to her subject. “I’m terribly stoic, so though the pain is excruciating, it is nothing compared with the political disadvantage.” She waited for Lorelei to ask what that might be, but the mermaid wasn’t rising to the bait, so Bronwyn proceeded to enlighten her anyway. “I mean, you can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to build a reputation as a warrior princess, and the first opponent one joins in hand-to-hand combat immediately joins one in breaking out in big sore spots. Naturally, I can hardly find sparring partners any longer. So I simply must get this curse removed as quickly as possible.”
Lorelei touched Carole’s arm urgently. “Come along, minnow. I think we should take a midnight dive. I’ll show you the mer harp, if you wish, and then maybe we might swim out and greet Cordelia coming home. What do you say?”
Carole cast an apologetic look at her friends and turned to dive in after the mermaid.
Jack was shaking with laughter. “Boils! Oh, Princess, that was wonderful! They will not dare try to drown you now. Maybe since we know that it is to Frostingdung we must go to release you from your curse, the fish women will take us there instead, as soon as Lady Carole tires of her swimming lessons.”
The swan let out a long hiss. “Not very likely. Did you not hear what she said about monsters in the waters? I cannot imagine monsters those hussies would fear, but I would not care to face them. We must find some other way to reach Belburga and lift the curse. I feel I am almost healed enough to draw the two of you in the chariot, but the mer creatures can always send their monster to fetch us, and even if they do not and we reach the shores of Frostingdung, there will be those monsters with which to contend. And, pardon me, but it is I who will have my underside exposed to the water. I thank you, no. You must try to find some less dangerous way to alleviate your curse, dear Bronwyn.”
“How about the shield?” Jack asked. “Why don’t you get it to take the curse off? It protected you from the mermaid magic and let us stop dancing while Carole was still jigging the mermaids about.”
“Ah, yes,” Bronwyn said, “But those were big spells, not petty little curses like flaws in my personal integrity. My shield wouldn’t waste its power considering such a trifle.”
Anastasia added, “Besides, a shield would protect one from outer danger, and it seems to me that your curse is very like mine, a part of yourself from which that designed for your exterior protection cannot defend you.”
Bronwyn only sighed.
Though she’d hinted repeatedly at how interested she was in seeing the underwater instruments that had first called to her on the river, Carole was too distracted now to pay close attention to them. Really, this business of being caught in the middle of two sets of friends who disliked one another was getting extremely taxing, more so because the accommodations were not at all what Mother would consider up to par. Though Carole herself found diving deep into the sea, dancing among bright fish, prying into the cargoes of barnacle-encrusted wrecks, and singing and conversing with sea creatures diverting enough to make up for sleeping on jagged rocks and eating nothing but seaweed, she had come to realize that neither Jack nor Bronwyn was able to appreciate the adventure’s educational qualities.
She’d tried to share. Jack had said something about treasure and once she had persuaded Lorelei to let her bring some to the surface to show him, but he had simply held it while asking her if there weren’t some way she could persuade the mermaids to allow them to leave. When she said there wasn’t, he asked if she could kill and deliver a fish or two on the sly, when the mermaids weren’t watching. But by then she had learned to speak fish and was more than a little horrified at his suggestion. Killing river fish had been different. They were stupid and not nearly so attractive as the varicolored species around the atoll.
“Now I suppose you are wondering how we play these without the strings losing their tone in the water,” Lorelei was saying, holding a pearl-encrusted gold harp with her own image carved on the body.
“Umm hmm,” Carole replied automatically. Though the grotto containing the harp and the myriad other valuables the mermaids had acquired during their “salvage operations” was the most splendid place Carole had ever seen, with the water-diffused moonlight shivering mysteriously through it, she only stayed to avoid hurting Lorelei’s feelings. Cordelia knew more important mer lore, and she had explained that mers ruled the sea because they were the original inhabitants of the world and mortal people a dried-out afterthought, an aberration. Since fishermen and serpent hunters killed sea creatures, mers redressed the balance by killing the killers. Logical as that sounded, Carole didn’t like it. She’d fancied a siren’s functions as mainly consisting of swimming, singing, hair-combing and looking fetching. Drowning people had not figured in her plans, but then she had never actually seen Cordelia or Lorelei drown anyone, much less done it herself. She imagined the talk of drowning was just that—talk—the kind of thing people liked to tell to show how fierce and powerful they or their ancestors had been, like Mother going on about Grandma Elspat eating children who came to eat her gingerbread house. Lorelei and Cordelia had surely just been trying to impress her and scare Bronwyn and Jack into behaving. Well, she’d impressed them right back and let them know what she thought of them aiming such shenanigans at her friends. She was pretty sure the stories told about mermaids by other people were nothing but jealous lies because the sirens were so beautiful and fascinating. Of course, there were all those skeletons at the base of the atoll and the wrecks, but ‘then too, these were stormy waters and the atoll was in an awkward place if one happened to be a ship caught out in a storm.
“Minnow, you’re not paying attention to me.” Lorelei pouted. “Cordelia will be cross if I don’t teach you anything today. I thought you’d want to know about the instruments! A girl can expand her range with them so. We called you with them at first to get your attention, so you’d hear our song.” She set the harp down next to a lute made of seashell, a conch horn, and pan pipes made of what looked like the bones of a human hand. The sand swirled up from the bottom when the harp sank into it.
“Lorelei, do you really drown people?” Carole asked, giving the little upward thrust of her shoulders and chest Lorelei and Cordelia had taught her to use to surface instead of kicking her feet, as she’d used to. Lorelei surfaced with her.
“If you’d only be sensible about the boy, I’d be glad to show you, sweeting,” Lorelei said in a worried voice. “I’m sorry about the ships but…”
Carole was about to protest that it was quite all right and not to bother on her account when a wave of the eastern sea roiled slightly higher than the rest, then appreciably higher, until she could make out the undulating loops of Ollie wriggling toward them, gray on a lighter gray sky. She
heard him calling before she actually saw him, but he was still half a league away before she could make out his message, and then only imperfectly, since she hadn’t learned all the sea serpent language yet.
But Lorelei did a delighted backflip and splashed back down again. “Oh, goody! How timely! You see how things work out? Just when we most needed a ship, Cordelia’s sighted one.” Her green eyes sparkled in the moonlight as a fond expression crossed her face. “There, didn’t I tell you Cordelia isn’t as hard as she sounds? Instead of wrecking it all by herself, she’s saved it for us. Quickly now, we’re to follow Ollie.”
They met Cordelia just before dawn, the leagues between her and them having been easily spanned by the rhythmic swimming stroke in which the mermaids had tutored Carole.
“I think we’ll send Ollie away for this one and wreck the ship on the atoll, just to give your pets a chance to prove their worth, minnow,” Cordelia said slyly, and dismissed the serpent with one of the ululations one used to speak to him. Carole didn’t know what Cordelia had in mind that Bronwyn and Jack were supposed to do to prove worthy, but somehow she didn’t feel it had anything to do with nursing survivors back to health.
While the ship was still a tiny dot in the distance, the mermaids began casting a mist ahead of them. Carole watched with admiration as they sent it skipping across the waves to ensnare the ship. Mist-making was something she hadn’t been able to do any better than jiggling, and now she could see why Cordelia had been so put out with her failure. The mist was a disguise for both sirens and for the rocks or sea serpent with which they would wreck the ship.
The sirens sang, and Carole rather reluctantly tried the song with them, but she hadn’t yet mastered all of the suggestive intonations that made each listener hear his own particular favorite loved one, so she sort of hummed along with the chorus.
The ship didn’t take much persuasion. It was scarcely enveloped by the mist before it was skating back out again, straight for them, its sails billowing against the lightening sky, its hull winking, bigger and bigger, through the fog, until it loomed over them. A beacon shone from the starboard bow, the side facing them, and floating on the mist Carole could see a black and white flag flying from the mast. As the ship drew nearer still, by lying flat and pushing backwards she could make out the design on the banner, and thought it a funny, gruesome sort of thing to put on a flag, a skull and couple of old bones. Wasn’t that the sign Great-Granny-Brown used to mark the concoctions she made that were poisonous?
This ship was not responding quite the way Cordelia said they did. It was sliding much too eagerly toward them, too quickly and too close. The idea was that the crew would drop everything as soon as they heard the first strains of the song and listen, neglecting to sail their ship and so leaving it prey to the perils the sirens had in store for them. When drawing a ship to a specific peril, one sang for a while to get everyone’s attention, stopped long enough to give the crew a chance to head towards one, then sang again, just so they wouldn’t become rational enough to realize the ship was off course. This ship cut through the water as if it knew exactly where it was going. Carole had been back-treading, wallowing in the waves near the stern while Lorelei and Cordelia continued their song and watched the ship’s quick progress with self-congratulatory smiles. They seemed to be looking forward to whatever happened next too much to notice what Carole saw as inconsistency between the theory and practice of ship beguilement.
With the vessel alongside the sirens, the deck suddenly swarmed with activity. Something was dropped over the railing. It fanned out, dipped down and scooped up the mermaids.
“EEEK!” Lorelei screamed.
“Ollie!” Cordelia cried more coherently, but by now the sea serpent’s leagues-long body would have covered a distance too vast to be spanned by even a siren’s unaided voice.
A chorus of laughter rang from the ship and the mist broke, as if dispelled by the laughter.
A net full of white skin, silvery fishtail, and lavender and green hair all tangled together was hauled up. The mermaids shrieked and rough laughter from on deck answered them. The men tugging the net leaned over the railing, and Carole saw their wicked leering faces. One especially evil-looking specimen wore a ragged black eye patch, which doubled rather than halved the nastiness of his leer. He laughed and hooted louder than all the others.
Carole dived, so they wouldn’t see her, and surfaced near enough to the hull to get a splinter in her knee while she tried to hear what was being said on board. All she heard was the sound of scuffling, the smack of what sounded like heavy fish against wood and once, with an accompanying yelp, against flesh.
Whether or not turnabout was fair play, in this case it just didn’t seem sporting. There were a great many sailors, and rather dreadful ones at that, to judge from the face of the villain she’d seen. For some reason, too, they seemed to have resisted the siren spell. It occurred to Carole that perhaps they were deaf, though who’d be fool enough to hire a shipload of deaf sailors she was too weary to imagine. It wouldn’t hurt to test anyway. She whistled a bit of a reel and listened. Feet scuffled back and forth in a non-musical, routine way, the mermaids continued to shriek apparently unheeded except for the odd guffaw here and there. Otherwise it was just slapping waves, creaking timbers and flapping sails. But though she didn’t seem to be making much of an impression on the sailors, a rope dangling just over her head was going crazy, whisking back and forth like the tail of a cow during peak fly season in time with her tune. Which gave her an idea.
She dove, surfacing far enough away that she could see the whole ship. The net containing Lorelei and Cordelia now bobbed silently from the prow. The mermaids had stopped shrieking and Carole wondered for a moment if they were dead. An isolated sob persuaded her that they were more likely just too demoralized to maintain a vigorous resistance.
Dawn was breaking by now. In spite of the vast and seemingly unmarked sea around her, Carole thought she could find her way back to the atoll. Though many of the mermaids’ best treasures were kept in the grotto at the foot of the atoll, Lorelei and Cordelia were indifferent housekeepers—little caches of jewels and coins, rotting furniture and the wrecks of great ships, were scattered all over the ocean floor like dirty flagons after a party. By diving periodically, she should be able to use these as, well, not landmarks, but points of reference at least. She didn’t want to wreck the ship as the mermaids had planned—now that they were in the net and she was in the sea, she found she didn’t want to do quite a few of the things they’d discussed, like living the rest of her life in the ocean. Not that she knew exactly what it was she did want to do, but she and the others could figure that out once they’d decided what to do with this stupid ship. If a giant sword-wielding princess complete with curse, a giant black swan with a royal background, a chubby junior gypsy, and a mer-witch in training couldn’t extricate themselves and their hostesses from the present situation, perhaps a sea serpent could. If Ollie wasn’t already at the atoll, surely one of the underwater instruments would fetch him in short order.
So she sang to the ship, rather than to the crew. But when the vessel tried to take charge of itself, in response to her spell, the helmsman caught on quickly and struggled for control. His flesh and blood hands were stronger than her little song, at this distance, and the ship was a very big piece of material to try to control. It was smaller than Ollie, of course, but then, Ollie was a living creature.
Very well, if they were taking over the rudder, she could find other material aboard that could use some exercise. Spotting a coil of rope, she trilled a loud, but sinuously serpentine measure at it and it responded as Ollie had done to an almost identical song, uncoiling itself and slinking toward the feet of the nearest man.
Another line, likewise responding to her recreational tone, whipped enthusiastically around the helmsman, who squawked, unheeded by his fellows, and fell down. After that, she could once more do as she liked with the ship, and led it like a stray dog back to t
he atoll.
The look-out in the crow’s nest was the first one to look close enough to the ship’s hull to see Carole—shortly before he looked far enough from it to see the atoll. Whether or not he was deserting his post by leaping overboard might have been debatable in a naval court-martial, but since his fellows couldn’t hear him, it could have been argued that he meant to warn them by example. Two men on the decks below saw him and dove in after him, and two more saw them and followed suit.
Another one flew past Carole’s nose, dousing her as he crashed into the water, and disappeared.
Jack hailed her from the atoll, waving hugely, and Bronwyn drew her sword. “Aha!” the Princess said, “It seems my cousin has been captured by pirates.”
Jack nodded. “What do you suppose she means to do with them?”
Carole was beckoning frantically to them and pointing to the foundering ship, but neither of them had mer blood and they weren’t about to shed any of the kind they did have trying to swim out and board a potentially hostile pirate ship at that distance.
Another party was less reluctant, however. Ollie’s head surfaced from the far side of the atoll, his front-most portion swaying above the fresh water pond only momentarily before he uncoiled himself, from around the rocky base of the island and zigzagged towards the ship. As the serpent passed, Bronwyn boarded him, and Jack, not to be outdone, followed suit. Anastasia flapped and fluttered uncertainly and hissed incomprehensible advice.
As the serpent encircled the ship, Carole joined her friends on his back and said, panting, “I think if we’re ever going to get out of here, we’d better not let Ollie crush this ship. We have to get the crew to surrender—fast.”
“Never fear, cousin,” Bronwyn said, “Bronwyn the Bold has boarded many a pirate ship. Just let me climb up on the floor and in no time I’ll have them all hanging by ropes from those rod things they have strung up there.”
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